Since approving more funding for caseworker salaries, the state of Texas and North Texas counties have seen improvements in investigator retention.Sources: Texas Child Protective Services, Collin County District Attorney’s Office, Children’s Advocacy Center of Collin County; Designed by Breanna Flores/Community Impact Newspaper

Since approving more funding for caseworker salaries, the state of Texas and North Texas counties have seen improvements in investigator retention. (Sources: Texas Child Protective Services, Collin County District Attorney’s Office, Children’s Advocacy Center of Collin County; Designed by Breanna Flores/Community Impact Newspaper)

The state of Texas last year approved funding and undertook other legislative measures to address a series of critical problems in the Child Protective Services system. Caseworkers were leaving their jobs at high rates, and caseloads were so high that it made it difficult to check on some vulnerable children in a timely manner.

Since then, conditions for CPS investigators have improved across the board, a fact acknowledged by children’s advocacy groups that have been pushing for reform and supported by data tracked by the state. Salaries are one-third higher, turnover rates are down, and caseworker responses to reports of abuse or neglect are more timely than their recent lows in 2016.

The state agency’s Collin County operation is based in an east Plano office that belongs to the Children’s Advocacy Center of Collin County. The agency’s Collin County caseworkers are staffed there, and collaborate with the advocacy center, as well as other parties including law enforcement, to offer a broad spectrum of services to families and children.

Last year in Collin County, 4,420 children were reported to Texas CPS as alleged victims of abuse or neglect. Investigators were able to confirm abuse or neglect occurred in more than one-quarter of those cases. In 2016, when turnover was highest, each caseworker in Collin County was asked to work on an average of 14.4 cases per month.

“That doesn’t seem like a lot, but a few cases makes a big difference, particularly when the children need to be seen regularly,” said Katherine Howard, a Plano resident who oversees CPS investigations in Collin County as program director.

In 2017, after staff turnover rates improved, Collin County caseworkers averaged 11.4 cases per month—a 21 percent decline. The percentage of Collin County children who were checked on in what the state considers a timely manner improved to 92 percent in 2017, up from 83 percent the previous year.

But challenges still exist to alleviate pressure on the state and local foster care system, and advocates have shifted their focus to addressing those issues in Collin County and beyond.

A victory for reform advocates

The funding for additional caseworkers and other measures to strengthen the foster care system were viewed approvingly by Dallas-based advocacy group TexProtects.

The organization lobbies Texas lawmakers and had been a vocal proponent of increasing state funding for salaries to improve caseworker retention. For the upcoming legislative session in 2019, the group is turning its attention to other matters like further bolstering the state’s foster care system.

“For 2017, we are incredibly encouraged by the $12,000 salary increase, for which we have been advocating for several years, and finally it came to fruition,” said Pamela McPeters, vice president of public affairs for TexProtects.

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The statewide numbers showed an almost immediate improvement in employee retention. In fiscal year 2016, 25 percent of CPS employees left the agency. By August of 2017, turnover had dropped to 18 percent. Investigative caseloads declined by one-third in the same time, according to the CPS annual report from that year.

High turnover rates did more than any other factor to contribute to casework overload and declines in timely responses in North Texas, Howard said. The size of the staff would have been sufficient at the time to carry out their work, she said, but staff turnover led to rising caseloads for the investigators who stayed.

“Of course, their morale gets affected when people leave,” Howard said. “They each have more work to do. It’s really important to have a good administrative staff or supervisors who are well trained.”

For now, advocates at TexProtects are approaching their legislative agenda for next year under the assumption that the caseworker turnover issue has been addressed. If things take a turn for the worse, however, they could try again to bring the issue to the attention of lawmakers in Austin.

“We’re encouraged by what we see,” McPeters said. “We’ll continue to monitor it. If we see a significant change between now and [the]session, we’ll definitely need to revisit it. But for now, what we see for the year of 2017, it is very encouraging. It looks as though the salary increase was effective.”

Addressing foster care

The county’s network of foster care families exceeds the number of Collin County children who are in foster care, the state’s numbers show. However, Collin County foster families are often called upon to house children from other parts of the state.

As a whole, the state’s foster care system is strained at times to meet the needs of all the children who are deemed too at-risk to stay in their homes, according to the Children’s Advocacy Center of Collin County, which is based in Plano.

“We need more foster homes,” said Chief Operating Officer Dan Powers of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Collin County. “We need more of our community to support these children that are in foster care—not just in foster care, but in the CPS system itself.”

At the end of May, the county had 316 foster homes and 182 Collin County children in foster care, according to the North Texas regional CPS office.

Before sending a child to a foster home, caseworkers typically explore whether the child has a family member who can take care of him or her. This approach is, more often than not, the best for a child who is taken out of his or her home, Powers said.

“That separation has very serious consequences on that child’s life, and placing them with somebody they know and someone familiar to them hopefully would decrease the trauma they experience,” Powers said. “And so definitely the first choice I know for any professional would be placing that child in some kind of family home.”

The Texas Legislature approved additional funding last year to incentivize kinship care as an alternative to foster care. Relatives who take in an at-risk child are provided $350 monthly payments to help cover part of the cost incurred by those families.

This approach also serves to widen the total pool of homes available to children and lessen the strain on existing foster homes, Powers said.

Advocates at TexProtects are now turning their attention to improving the foster care system, primarily by prompting the state to take advantage of provisions in a new federal law. The Family First Prevention Services Act, signed into law in February, offers resources to states that further incentivize relatives taking in children and alleviating pressure on the foster system, among other measures.

But the state will need to tighten up aspects of its foster care system to reap the benefits of the law, a major focus of TexProtects’ lobbying efforts in the 2019 legislative session, McPeters said. Some of the funding for services in the bill are contingent on the state meeting standards for congregate care facilities, where children are sometimes placed in groups under supervision when they do not have a home to go to.

“We will not be able to receive the funds for the prevention services to keep kids out of foster care unless we can come into compliance with the congregate care restrictions,” McPeters said.

Another challenge for investigators and advocates alike will be keeping up with the rapid population growth in Collin County. As the population grows, Powers said, more will be asked of existing caseworkers and providers of counseling and other family services like those offered at the Children’s Advocacy Center.

“Affluence, I don’t think, makes much of a difference in this world, unfortunately,” said Powers, who is also a former child-protection caseworker. “Child abuse affects every economic group, every ethnicity. We’re not immune to it here in Collin County.”

Daniel Houston covers Plano city government, transportation, business and education for Community Impact Newspaper. A Fort Worth native and Baylor University graduate, Daniel reported previously for The Dallas Morning News and The Associated Press in Oklahoma City.